Praise for

Zora and Me (book 1)

NEW PAPERBACK COVER

COMING THIS FALL

 “The brilliance of this novel is its rendering of

African-American child life during the Jim Crow
era as a time of wonder and imagination, while
also attending to its harsh realities. Absolutely
outstanding.” — Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Evokes a world of un-self-conscious blackness

and children steeped in games and fantasy in a
moral, tightknit community.”
— The New York Times Book Review

“Woven through this eerie whodunit are historic

details of Zora’s personality, family dynamics,
and racially charged times. This mystery not only
thrills and chills but vibrantly evokes a small
Southern town in the early twentieth century.”
— The Washington Post

PB: 978-0-7636-5814-4
$7.99 ($10.99 CAN)
Age 10 and up • 192 pages

About the Author: T. R. Simon is the co-author, with Victoria

Bond, of the 2011 John Steptoe New Talent Author Award winner Zora
and Me. She is also the co-author, with Richard Simon, of Oskar and the
Eight Blessings, illustrated by Mark Siegel and winner of the National Jewish
Book Award for Children’s Literature. T. R. Simon lives in Westchester
County, New York.
 Q & A with

How do the maturing Carrie and Zora see the world differently as they
approach their teens?

In book two of the Zora and Me trilogy, Zora and Carrie are now twelve going on thirteen. Although
they are still children, they have encountered the sorrow of death along with the pride and joy that life
in Eatonville affords them. What begins to alter them now is a slowly growing awareness of the past.
While Eatonville could seem idyllic, tucked away from the daily brutality of the Jim Crow South, it is
not free from the shadow of American history, particularly from the history of slavery. The history of
slavery is a hard thing for young people because it requires them to confront the brutality of hate and
the despair of powerlessness. Zora and Carrie grapple with the conflicted feelings that learning about
Eatonville’s history brings up while simultaneously realizing that life is necessarily, for good and for
bad, informed by the past.

Why did you choose to tell this book with dual narratives?

I struggled with how to powerfully connect the fact of Jim Crow to the institution of slavery.
Ultimately, I decided that the most effective way to do that was to show them side by side.
Reconstruction was the attempt of newly freed slaves to enact self-determination, and Jim Crow was a
formalization of the backlash to Reconstruction. If you don’t understand how slavery operated and the
ideas of race that made slavery go, you can’t understand Jim Crow as the logical social extension of that
violently inhumane practice.

Zora and Carrie make assumptions about the reclusive and enigmatic
Mr. Polk and Old Lady Bronson that end up being pretty off base. What
can young readers learn from the girls’ tendencies to jump to their own
conclusions?

The mind always wants to fill in narrative blanks. For Zora, this always leads to an exciting story, and
Carrie inevitably gets pulled into that story. In this case, two people they’ve known their whole lives,
Old Lady Bronson and Mr. Polk, suddenly appear to them in a very different light. They are not the
distant adults whose odd ways are part of the town’s quirky fabric, but people whose past contains
a mystery. Suddenly Zora and Carrie find that, instead of looking at them from the outside, they

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Illustration copyright © 2018 by Sally Wern Comport
are trying to get inside their thoughts and understand their actions. That is always the point at which
objectification ends and human empathy begins. We can’t really know another person until we are willing
to learn and understand their story. Zora and Me: The Cursed Ground is about how much a person’s story,
otherwise known as their history, can change what you understand about them, yourself, and the world
around you.

What research did you do for this novel?

For the parts on slavery, I read scholarly histories and dozens of slave narratives, as well as novels
about slavery. In some respects, the backstory for the slave section came easily. As a child, I lived in
the Dominican Republic, and I still have vivid memories of running rings around lime trees hung with
wasp nests and swimming with my mother out into the deep blue ocean waters. As an adult studying
anthropology, I was joyful that Zora Neale Hurston chose to do ethnographic work on an island that was
so dear to me. In this way, I began to wonder how her fascination with travel and the Caribbean might
have been ignited in childhood.

By pure coincidence, 2018 will see the release of Zora and Me: The Cursed
Ground as well as a never before published work from Zora Neale Hurston
herself. How do you feel about reading more of her work? How do you hope it
will further connect young readers with the Zora and Me novels?

I am thrilled that new Zora work is being made available! Although most widely known for her fiction,
Zora was a formal intellectual of great magnitude; she is one of our most compelling and culturally precise
chroniclers of the black American experience. Her new book, Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo,”
about Cudjo Lewis, the last survivor of the Atlantic slave trade, will be a significant contribution to the
field of historical anthropology. I’m also excited because Barracoon segues beautifully with young Zora
learning about the horrors and complexities of slavery and wanting to bring that history to light.

Candlewick Press • www.candlewick.com

Illustration copyright © 2018 by Sally Wern Comport